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. 2023 Feb 3;18(2):e0266531.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266531. eCollection 2023.

Citizens' economic recovery models for a pandemic

Asmus Leth Olsen  1 , Anders Woller  1
Affiliations

Citizens' economic recovery models for a pandemic

Asmus Leth Olsen et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought sudden economic devastation and forced countries to respond with policies to counter the looming economic crisis. What policy response do citizens prefer to combat an economic decline due to a pandemic? We study the preferences of citizens regarding economic policy and changes in these preferences as the pandemic unfolded in Denmark. Denmark passed early and comprehensive legislation with broad support from all political parties to counter the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. We employ a large nationally representative two-wave panel of Danish citizens (N = 12,131) drawn from the administrative registers, from which data was collected at the onset of the economic shock and immediately prior to economic recovery. In both waves the same subjects describe their preferred economic solution to COVID-19 in open-text format. We generate a simple dictionary method to uncover a set of distinct laymen economic policy responses. First, we find that citizens formulated a diverse set of policy interventions. Second, citizens become markedly stronger proponents of economic intervention as the crisis unfolded. Finally, we show how differences in economic preferences across partisanship vanished during the crisis.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1
Development in business (Panel A, monthly) and consumer trust (Panel B, monthly), GDP (Panel C, quarterly) and unemployment (Panel D, monthly). Panel E shows economic initiatives to combat COVID-19. Red lines indicate invitation to the two survey waves.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Most common bigrams in open-ended answers across the two waves.
Fig 3
Fig 3
Panel A: Distribution across answer categories (all subjects). Panel B: Intervention vs. non-intervention and types of policy intervention (subjects providing economic answer). Lines are 95% confidence intervals.
Fig 4
Fig 4
Panel A: Partisan responses to the COVID-19. Panel B: Differences before and after the negative economic shock. Red dots denote estimate means for center-left party voters and blue dots center-right party voters. Lines are 95% confidence intervals and bars reflect group sizes. Parties are sorted by their voters’ stance on economic inequality from necessary (top) to undesirable (bottom) from the Danish Election Survey [23].
Fig 5
Fig 5. Support for different state interventions across ideology.
Lines are 95% confidence intervals.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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